13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “I am,” the ghost girl replied. Her face was etched with eternal sorrow, and even though she was nothing more than a mere reflection of her true self, there were streaks of tears visible on her ghastly face. “You know me? You know what happened?”

  “I…I do,” Bea said. A loud bang sounded from above. She could not know that this was Dan ripping away at the first door.

  “You must hurry. Your step-father is consumed by evil,” Beatrice said.

  “Tell me about it,” Bea replied. Fear took a hold of her as another bang resounded from above. This was Dan ripping away the second door. The sound of a familiar dog’s barking erupted from outside.

  “He’s coming. And he’s possessed. My step-mother, she’s taken a hold of him,” the ghost said.

  “Man, what is it with step-parents?” Bea said.

  “You must run from this house, be safe somewhere else. Leave the dead be,” the ghost said.

  “Your butler misses you. Even in death, you know. He said he was sorry, he tried to save you,” Bea said.

  “Dead people can’t open doors. I was locked in until now. I will meet him and reassure him. I’ll let him know that I forgive him,” Beatrice said.

  “I’m scared,” Bea said, “and not of you or your butler, but of Dan. Will you come with me?”

  The ghost nodded and floated towards Bea. They slowly made their way towards the staircase. “Live the life I never could. Go see London, go see the world. Go live, be happy, be alive,” the ghost said.

  “My mother…” Bea began to explain but stopped midway. The door to the basement was jolting heavily. It flung open and landed on the floor to one side. Bea rolled to her left to avoid its trajectory.

  Standing at the door, with malice in his eyes and a cleaver in his hands, was Dan. “Whore-child! Come here!” he said and made a run for Bea. Bea helplessly looked around and found the ghost had disappeared. In his wild frenzy, Dan rushed at her, but she was quick, and rolled for the second time to avoid him. He hit the wall of the basement and, seeing her chance, Bea made a run for upstairs.

  She stood frozen as she saw, in the middle of the room, the ghost butler and Beatrice hugging one other. They were crying, they were sorrowful, but as they both turned to look at Bea, she saw that they were also thankful.

  “You reconciled us,” the butler said. Ghost Beatrice nodded, sending pearl-like transparent tears flying in the air.

  “Save me!” said Bea, as she ran as far from the basement door as possible. The only way was out. Her mother, God knew how, was still asleep. Was she dead? Was she drugged? Bea did not have time to consider the possibilities, and made a leap for the door, opening it with one twist and a pull. As she did so, Hodor, who was clawing from the other side, barged in and jumped at Dan.

  Cindy had rescued herself from the pond, and was standing drenched at the door. She saw Bea run out and Hodor dart in, and yelled, “Bea! What’s wrong? I heard noises. Is everything okay?”

  “He’s going to kill me!” Bea cried and hid behind Cindy, not minding that she was cold and damp.

  They were at the helm of the door when they saw Dan grab Hodor by the throat, and wring him like a washcloth, instantly breaking the poor dog’s neck. Dan ran at Bea and Cindy, discarding the lifeless dog like a ragdoll across the lounge floor. Cindy shielded Bea behind her, and stood her ground.

  White, ethereal light enveloped the room, as the two ghosts stood side by side watching Dan approach. The ghosts placed themselves between Dan and the doorway. He made to attack the ghosts, but his hands passed through them.

  “We’re equals on this plane, Sarah,” the butler said. “And two is greater than one.”

  Dan watched wide eyed, tethered to his spot, as the ghosts advanced on him, and in that shimmering white light they overcame him, and sent him flying to the wall behind him. He struck his head on the wall, leaving a splotch of thick, black blood.

  When his limp body hit the ground, he was already departed, along with the ghost of Sarah.

  Bea saw this all from her vantage point behind Cindy. The ghosts turned to her, walked to the doorway and stopped.

  “We’re bound to this house. We cannot get out. Long have been our deathless nights, and longer our craving for revenge. But because of you, we have it now. For this, we thank you,” and with that the ghosts disappeared, dissolving into the air until they were no more.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Jean, normally a mellow person who wouldn’t dream of using profanities, stepped out of her bedroom with her eyes half shut. She found a dead dog sprawled across the dining table and her husband’s twisted and bleeding corpse lying lifeless against the wall.

  “Ma’am. I can explain,” Cindy began, comforting the crying widow as she guided her back to her bedroom, where everything was explained.

  Bea remained standing in the doorway, too perplexed by the happenings to move, relieved in the knowledge that it was over. What was to come next, she did not know. But she did know this: the worst was over. The good ghosts had their closure, and the bad spirit had her just deserts. She was still shocked about Dan, but you and I both know that she will not miss him nor shed a tear over his departure. In fact, a sick and twisted part of her was actually rather glad that he was dead. She even went as far as to smile as she looked at his corpse. She wouldn’t tell anyone in her life that she did.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

  Epilogue

  “Our time together was brief, but I guess I will miss you, kid,” Cindy pulled a cigarette out of her pack, making the rest of them pull out in the shape of a DJ’s equalizer. She frustratingly pushed the others back in. It was raining, and everything was sticky. She and Bea were standing under the very same tree where they had first met. Its shade protected them from the drizzle.

  “I will miss you too. God knows what would have happened if you and Hodor hadn’t come to my house that night. Speaking of Hodor, I’ll miss him. He was a good dog,” Bea said.

  Cindy’s eyes became watery at the mention of her dog. Even though she knew that he had died for a greater purpose, and that dogs were perhaps the only creatures on earth who had a free pass to heaven, his loss still pained her.

  “What are you going to do next?” Cindy asked.

  “Mum’ has Dan’s inheritance, including the house. I’m going back to London right now. The Uber should be here any minute to take me to the train station. So, yeah, she’s going to sell up, and handle the house until it is back in the hands of the property agent, and then she’ll join me in London,” Bea said. She had in her hand a small bag, small in size, but big enough to hold her Switch and a change of clothes. She was off to London to live with her gran. Never in her life would she ever return to Leeds.

  The last three days had gone in a daze. Her mother had gone through a period of insanity, and needed meds to calm her down. After Bea explained her story, and Cindy told her what she had seen, and how Dan had killed her dog and had tried to do likewise to Bea, she calmed down.

  “How can I have been so blind that I didn’t see?” she asked her daughter after the police had come and gone, and Dan’s body had been removed by ambulance to the morgue.

  “I tried to tell you so many times, mum,” Bea said.

  “My child,” Jean burst into tears, “I am so sorry.” Bea hugged her mother and held her tight. Even adults were allowed to make mistakes. And sometimes it was up to the children to forgive them.

  Dan’s lawyer arrived later, asked his questions, and then produced Dan’s will. It was pretty standard. Turns out he was less of a jerk in death than he was in life.

  “Alright. I’ll come by every once in a while. You stay safe,” Cindy ruffled Bea’s hair and gave her a quick hug.

  “I will. It’s not like my grandma’s house is infested with ghosts,” Bea laughed and lifted her bag. Her Uber was here. She looked one last time at the house, and at her friend, got in her car and smiled.

  She was going back home.

  The Haunting of
Bleak House

  Clarice Black

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  Prologue

  It was a time of unparalleled pestilence. One of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse was let loose on London, and he was wreaking havoc, death and destruction of countless lives in his wake. London bridge, which wouldn’t be built for another two hundred years, was falling down, falling down, falling down in every metaphorical sense. The streets, paved though they were with stone and cement, were nonetheless marred with disease. The Great Plague of London was the last epidemic of its kind and it was pulling no stops in taking as many lives as it could. Black, cloudless nights prevailed and when the sun came up, people were either too sick or too dead to look at it. The well-off had sought sanctum in their castellated abbeys and their abodes far from London. And those who were not well-off were left at the mercy of a city succumbing to chaos.

  Historians would state that The Great Plague of London rivalled, in its deadliness, the Black Death which had ravaged most of Eurasia three centuries before. Statisticians would state that the rate of death and the exponential spread of disease was, as yet, unseen. What those academics and fellows of knowledge will tell you, what seems to have been lost between the lines of history books, what has been deemed a clerical error in the statistical surveys, is the helplessness, the misery and gloom that gripped at the heart of the denizens of that no-longer-great city of England. Facts and figures cannot convey emotions of the human condition.

  The point of civilization seemed folly, the reason to live looked bleak and thus, those who were neither amongst the well-off or the poor sought to escape the city and the terrible curse that had plagued it. A migration was shaping to take place. Men huddled their women close and kept their children’s hands tight within their own, and with handkerchiefs stifled against their faces like their lives depended on it, they headed for the exit, like countless others who sought riddance.

  However, the ruling class - The Queen, the King with all his horses and all his men-were not so eager to let the escapists escape. “We cannot let you off so easily. Not while the bubonic plague is still rampant!” the guards at the exit cried at the horde of people which gathered. They cried the same thing to numerous hordes until all escapists were forcibly made to understand that their salvation lay in the declaration of their healthiness. They had to be free of any signs of the plague. Only the plague. They could have tuberculosis, they could have cancer or hepatitis, or gout or scurvy. They could even have a terminal disease as long as it was not the plague. All they had to do was to get a certificate from a functional hospital within London at that time. Or one of the clinics where the ordained plague doctors sat.

  The medical topography of London and its immediate adjoining areas was a shameful mess. Councils and Justices enforced a barbaric law by force - seeing as no one was going to obey it otherwise - that if there was a man, woman, kid or pet afflicted with the disease, that particular house was sealed up, with its tenants left to die. That was what passed for quarantine back in those days. There were pest houses specifically built up for the purpose of mass-dumping the sickly and leaving them to face their death in a communal manner. Patients too weak to so much as turn their heads would hear the rattle of death as it visited the afflicted one by one. The silent ruffle of the black cloak of the skeletal figure was the only sound that resounded in those pest houses other than the coughing, the infrequent retching, crying, yelling and gurgling. And death marked them all with its scythe and within a matter of days, if not hours, it killed them all.

  The city had its doctors, pharmacists and chemists. Not nearly enough though. For five hundred sick people, there was only one doctor to oversee them. By the time he’d be finished for the day with this stampede of patients and non-patients alike, his supplies of medicine and his will to live would have been drained completely. And after the law passed in the middle of all the tumult that dictated that people who wish to join the exodus must have medical certificates, the misery of the doctors worsened.

  They were dreadful figures, the doctors were. There was nothing ‘consoling’ about their demeanour back in those days. But that was not out of their own choice, rather it was so that they’d remain safe from the disease. They draped themselves in robes in black, beige or the colour of skin (each to their own liking; think what you might of the deplorable circumstances of the people in London at that time, their eloquent sense of fashion never succumbed to any disease). They donned gloves made of leather; leather so hard and inflexible that nothing, no external particle nor any possible agent carrying the disease, touched their skin. That was all it took in those days for the disease to spread; merely being in the same vicinity as a plague-ridden person, you could get the disease. But far more scarier and far gloomier than all the other elements of the doctors’ attire were the masks that they wore. The mask with giant goggles tinted black, and the beak that bore semblance to that of an eagle. That is, if eagles looked sinister and ready to poke a hole in your neck. The doctors were not to blame for this attire. If anything, it served as a means of protection against the rampant disease.

  And thus, when the Lord Mayor Sir Fitzwilliam Dornan passed an irrefutable law (irrefutable because his authority was the only authority that held at that point in the city seeing as how the Queen and the King had shifted, along with their indispensable nobilities, to the safer parts of their kingdom) that anyone who wished to leave the city had to produce a medical certificate declaring that he/she was not ill, all the men and women horded to the doctors. But the doctors, some more than others, had taken to giving privilege to those who offered more money or, in the case where money was not involved, more amenities. But these doctors, the ones who extorted the surviving masses, they were few in number. The rest were either catching the disease and surrendering to it or they were too busy in their Good Samaritanism to wrest money and amenities out of the needy.

  There was one doctor, who had seemingly averted the gaze of disease, and had achieved a miraculous immunity to it. His name was Dr James Campbell. It was rumoured that he was not treating the poor at all. He had shifted his attention to the upper-class citizens. In return for money, he was offering them medical certificates that pronounced the people as healthy, regardless of whether they were. Money was his main and only motive. This was in contrast and in contradiction to the conduct of the rest, or most, of the plague doctors. All the doctors who were treating patients of bubonic plague at that time, were given a lofty stipend by the government. But there were doctors like James Campbell, him being the epitome of his kind, who surcharged more money for special favours. These favours included everything from giving more medication to granting illegal, perjured certificates to people who were sick.

  Every day there stood a crowd of poor people in front of his office, waiting for him to treat them, or at the very least diagnose them. He owed them that. The treatment and diagnosis was declared free by the government. Who was he to hoard his time and attention from them when the government had dictated to him not to do so? They stood in front of his office for months, not days, not hours: months-and watched as the affluent class simply barged in on the basis of monetary influence. Two bodyguards manned this doctor’s door to disallow the poorer entry. What were initially rumours transpired and evolved into facts. It became well known all over London that James Campbell was a fiend. That he was a doctor not fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath. They gathered around his clinic, day by day increasing in number, their anger exponentiating as he turned them down one by one. They threw rotten tomatoes, apples, bricks and once, someone threw a head of his deceased mother while screaming “look what you’ve done, you insensitive bastard! Me mum’s dead! All because of you!” Dr Campbell, upon hearing the thud of a human head on his window, came outside, held out a hand to his bodyguards to not interfere, and picked up the head. He looked at it from behind the devilish mask he was wearing. His breath was materializing from out of the breathing pores in the mask. He grabbed the head, in al
l matters humiliating, by the hair and went to the man who had thrown it. “Your mother deserved it. All of you do. We all, as Englanders, do. This is the wrath of God. If that’s what makes you sleep easier at night, believe it. If not, then rest assured in the knowledge that the un-impeding grasp of death is not in the least obstructed by someone as flail as me, a mere physician. Do not disgrace the dead. Did you tear her head off yourself? Am I to blame for this act of brutality on your behalf? No. Own your mistake. And don’t come to me if you don’t have the money for it. The mayor doesn’t care about you. The King surely doesn’t. And if you don’t have money-” he raised his voice so that all who were present would hear, “-do not come to me!”

  If this was not testament to his heartlessness, what he did next surely was. He took off his mask, his ghoulish mask along with which he donned a red robe, red as the blood and the colour of a crimson night, when evil lurks in the form of sky-borne demons, and spat at the man’s feet.

  Once he had made enough money, he intended to get the hell out of the city and seek sanctum in a luxurious resort far from London. He had no family. His parents had died when he was little, he did not marry and the only fling he’d ever had with a woman was at the brothel, after he’d spent a long day at work. He’d make sure that the night in that sleazy brothel bedroom would be longer. The irony was that, when the very same whore whom he’d had sex with numerous times (she was his favourite, and the only one whom he’d bedded) came to him in her time of need to get a certificate of health, he looked at her pathetically and proclaimed that he did not know any harlots. “Unless you’ve the money, you’re not allowed treatment here”, he had said to her, leaving her forlorn and crying on the road beside his clinic with the rest of those whom he had refused to treat.